SHERRINGTON, CHARLES. 1857-1952.


Autograph Letter Signed ("C.S. Sherrington") to Charles S. Myers giving a detailed discussion of inhibition, including two neurophysiological diagrams, 8 pp, on two bifolia, 8vo, February 11, 1909, on his Grove Park letterhead, light soiling.AN IMPORTANT LETTER ON ONE OF SHERRINGTON'S FAVORITE SUBJECTS. Sherrington was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1932, along with Edgar Adrian, "for their discoveries regarding the functions of neurons," and he has been described as "the most outstanding and versatile neurophysiologist of the modern era" (McHenry, Garrison's History of Neurology, Springfield, 1969, p 227). In this letter to Myers (who wrote the first paper on shell shock, in 1915), he describes experiments and reacts to one of Myers's recent publications on inhibition. He summarizes some of his own recent experiments on inhibition just reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, writing, "These show I think that one of the uses of inhibition is to grade muscular excitations by moderating them, the Excit. & the Inhib. fusing algebraically to a resultant as if we expressed them by numerals having + & - signs prefixed. When fatigue comes in, seems to be as a weakening of Excit. (or of Inhib.) so that the number we might express it by in the algebraical sum becomes a smaller one...." One of the two diagrams depicts how excitatory and inhibitory afferent neurons merge at a synapse to influence a muscular response. "After 1906 one of the chief problems occupying Sherrington's attention was inhibition. By 1925, in 'Remarks on Some Aspects of Reflex Inhibition,' he was ready to state his concept of central excitatory and inhibitory states and, as he had first suggested in 1908, of excitation and inhibition interacting algebraically at the synapse" (DSB 12, pp 395-403). An important and detailed neurophysiological letter with diagrams.